London Internet Exchange Sees Record UK Traffic of 9.5Tbps

Internet traffic travelling across the London Internet Exchange (LINX), which excludes data being passed by private interconnection (PI), reached a new record peak of 9.5Tbps (Terabits per second) on the Tuesday 14th May 2024 at around 8:25pm this week.

The figure, which just for comparison, is up from 7.83Tbps recorded during August 2023. Such peaks typically occur when major new software releases, large video game updates or Premier League football streams are occurring – this tends to rise in the evenings, when more people are online.

NOTE: ISPs use sophisticated Content Delivery Networks (CDN) and other systems to manage the load from such events, which caches popular content closer in the network to users (i.e. improves performance without adding strain, which also keeps costs down).

The LINX typically handles a key chunk of UK and global data traffic through their switches via around a thousand members (broadband ISPs, mobile operators etc.). But LINX’s data does not provide a complete overview of the internet traffic flow from all ISPs, although they do give a useful indication of how much extra traffic is flowing around when compared with normal conditions.

LINX Traffic (Aggregated) – 10th to 16th May 2024

Demand for data is constantly rising and broadband connections are forever getting faster, thus new peaks of usage are being set all the time by every ISP. Ofcom’s last Connected Nations 2023 study noted that the average monthly data volume per household on fixed broadband connections increased over the past year to 535 GigaBytes (up by 11% vs 482GB last year).

Recent Posts